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Comment by 12971h | Hacker News Reader

Robert Kagan is not wrong about many points, but it is worth noting that he is one of the leading neocons, husband of Nuland, and architect of PNAC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...

The think tank (Brookings Institute) which he is part of laid out the Iran strategy "Path to Persia" something like 15 years ago.

I think he does recognize that the US needs Europe for projecting power, so that part is genuine. The US could not prosper against a hypothetical Eurasian union.

Not sure what to make of this. Maybe it is supposed to appease the EU (you still have allies in Washington), maybe it is a wakeup call for the deep state to pull the brakes.

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Who even is the deep state any more? MAGA was sure it was backroom democrats. Project 2025 has provided much of the playbook for this administrations run, and thats deep red conservative territory. Meanwhile we have an overwhelming body of evidence for market manipulation and extreme profit taking on the war and oil fronts, pointing to politically aligned financiers.

I don't think the deep state is any discernible single group, but rather whoever we want to point the finger at on a particular topic.

The deep state is any agent of meaningful power/influence that works for the government or is very closely entangled with the government, and that retains some or all of their power/influence from one admin to the next.

That includes for example powerful figures in the Pentagon or intelligence agencies that remain from one admin to the next. These people all have agendas of their own, and they network as people do. Dick Cheney was a deep state figure across a couple of decades, often working in the shadows. So was Rumsfeld. So was Kissinger across a few decades during his prime power/influence years. They all had long-term agendas, their ideas about the world, and extremely deep connections throughout the Federal Government.

It's not a mysterious conspiracy. It's just people with power/influence pursuing outcomes that they'd like to see happen, and working with other like-minded people to get there.

There is this building where guys wearing masks wheel you into a room behind locked doors at dawn and then use drugs to knock you out. They then take sharp knives and cut you open and rummage around your insides, sometimes taking organs out. Blood goes everywhere. The footage is gory. When they're done with you it may takes you weeks to recover.

The rest of just call his "surgery at a hospital".

My point is that you've just described in nefarious terms the "civil service" or the "administrative state". Every government department is full of career civil servants who will go through many administrations. Only the very top officials in any department are political appointees. We're talking the secretary, their deputies and some positions under those.

Government simply cannot function without career civil servants who end up becoming subject matter experts in what they're administering.

Or, you know, you can nerfariously say "deep state".

Calling it "civil service" instead of "deep state" does not make it any better. We don't have either in the Constitution so whatever you call it, it has to be removed from power.

And then what? The spoils system? Rampant incompetence?

And, we have to get rid of it because it's not in the Constitution? You know what else isn't in the Constitution? DHS. The IRS. ICE. An enormous number of other agencies.

The Constitution gives very little guidance on the Executive Branch, other than the President and Vice President. That does not mean that hiring people in federal agencies is unconstitutional! It just means that the Constitution is silent on the topic, neither requiring nor prohibiting very much.

Then back to the system defined in the Constitution, it gives enough guidance. If you think the President is not enough for the Executive - amend the Constitution, used to be enough for ~200 years though.

The Constitution does not define a civil service system. You seem to interpret that as saying that any system is unconstitutional until the Constitution is amended to define one. That is... let's just call it "very much a minority interpretation".

We are not going to either amend the Constitution nor abolish the civil service just because some pseudonymous online account says we should.

The Constitution defines just three branches of power, if the "civil service system" has a power and is not one of the branches then it unconstitutional by common sense and elementary logic. And this "civil servant system" evidentially has power and is not a part of either of the three branches (which are all enumerated in the Constitution) ergo it's an unconstitutional junta.

>We are not going to either amend the Constitution nor abolish the civil service just because some pseudonymous online account says we should.

Did not you participate in the mass crying out on this very site when DOGE had been firing the "civil servants"?

The constitution says the president must "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". That means hiring people to enforce the laws, that's the civil servant system.

That means the whole Executive branch is the president and if he can delegate his power to some other people he also should be able to revoke the delegation and fire those people, which is not the case now. The president is semi-successful in firing these "servants" and some judges insist that it's illegal.

It's illegal because of the Civil Service Act, not because of the Constitution.

Why didn't you comment on the other agencies mentioned? A simple yes or no would be enough.

> Federal employees are unconstitutional

Are you a law clerk for Clarence Thomas?

I think the distinction between the one that you're describing and the one that the person you're replying to is describing is crime.

People like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheneye were part of a criminal conspiracy to rob the America people and destabilize the US to make it ripe for further hijacking.

That's the deepstate -- it's everything you mentioned above + a criminal conspiracy mindset.

In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.

A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven. If their favorite party is in power, they use their job to push their ideology to its limits. If the opposition party won the election; then they view their role as a means to 'resist', 'thwart', or otherwise delay any policies the elected officials try to implement.

Their general view is that their own opinions are superior to those of voters.

I'm sorry but no. "Deep state" is nothing more than enemy within propaganda to justify a purge of government departments to replace them with ideologues and to further concentrate power in the hands of the so-called "unitary executive".

The point of my comment is that Republicans have this habit of describing perfectly ordinary and normal things in nefarious tones to make them sound sinister. The real problem is people are so gullible in falling for it.

> A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven

What you're describing is a federal employee. The kind that takes a massive pay cut, and loses out on paycheck stability (due to government shutdowns), because they at least start out earnestly attempting to improve the system.

How they define "improving the system" varies by ideology, but career civil servants, in wanting to follow their definition of improving the system, are ideologically driven.

What you're describing is still just "A collection of civil servants that aren't disillusioned and dead inside"

> In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.

Sure, but a bunch of stuff isn't supposed to change just because the president changes. It's supposed to take laws to change it, or even amendments. If those haven't been passed and the President tries to do that stuff anyway, we should want our civil servants to resist that.

The contrary notion is the Unitary Executive, which is that the president should be absolute dictator of what the executive branch does, with legality to be sorted out elsewhere even in egregious cases. This notion is very bad and we should not let it become normal, especially in a world where we've already seen absolutely insane rulings that place the president personally above the law.

If the executive is empowered by the legislative, we should not want civil servants to do gladly do every thing a president might ask of them. If the president is instead possessed by default of unlimited power to direct the executive branch and it's the legislative branch's job to reign in that boundless power (until the president ignores the law, then it's the judicial's job to finally make the executive knock it off one or more years later) then we would want totally obedient (to the president) civil servants. However, this latter idea is stupid and bad, so, we should want civil servants that don't treat the president's word as law, but the law as law.

The deep state, for example, would tell a president that if you bomb Iran and kill its autocratic leader, the country might close the Strait of Hormuz. And that naval escorts through the strait will only get sailors killed.

Trump ran on vanquishing the deep state because all he cares about is personal loyalty, not loyalty to the country, the Constitution, or objective fact.

And so many of you bought it.

Yeah man, Allen Dulles was just a humble civil servant.

You're thinking of the "monoparty/uniparty". The deep state (at least since 2016) is people who work for the federal government as a career.

Because statecraft isn't gig work.

> Who even is the deep state any more?

The same thing it's always been: The military-industrial complex.

> MAGA was sure it was backroom democrats.

It's not that hard to distinguish "them", just look at how fast the mainstream media threw Biden under the bus over Afghanistan withdrawal.

1)POTUS orders the withdrawal.

2)Generals botch the withdrawal on purpose.

3)Mainstream media (left and right) eviscerates the POTUS. This sends a strong message to this POTUS, as well as any subsequent Presidents: "Don't mess with the profits of the complex or else."

This was the tipping point for me when I realized that the deep state is not a just a bogeyman conjured up by the right wingers. Should you cross the complex, it will just as easily come for you even if you're a Democrat that's been in politics for 50 years.

Finally, the Atlantic is as establishment as it gets. No matter which party is in power, their editorial board serves the ruling class, of which almost nobody on HN is a part of.

Whether their interests align with yours or not you can ascertain just by looking at approval ratings of the US Congress.

It was Trump who made that deal to withdraw from Afghanistan by May 2021. Biden as POTUS followed through with some delays.

So, what was this about not being a bogeyman being conjured by right again?

The deep state is and always has been the ultra-wealthy.

Rampant, uncontrolled consolidation of media, PACs, lobbying, and granting cushy jobs to retired congresspeople all give the wealthiest individuals extremely outsized control over what happens in the US government.

I think the problem is that the "deep state" really came into public consciousness with Trump, on his first run. While I agree with your definition of the deep state, that is not what most people think of in current days, and Trump is probably the deepest of deep state you can legally be. He ran against the deep state, while being deeply embedded inside it. It was just easier to pass off because he wasn't a politician (at least from an American point of view, not sure of your country of origin).

It’s just funny he ran on releasing all of the Epstein Files, didn’t, and when we caught a glimpse of a slither of it, it turned out he was in there so much it could have been renamed the Trump Files

Yeah, given that there are some theories floating around that Trump is actually executing the "Path to Persia" paper, it's interesting that those people are (ostensibly) distancing themselves from it.

I think most far from center paper writers are more successful if they don't let reality limit their ideas. Probably few consider a real idiot with enough power to ruin them as a threat when they start putting pen to page.

"Be careful what you wish for, it might come true"

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